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Health insurance, life insurance, business liability, homeowners, auto, rental property coverage, umbrella policies, long term care insurance–Wow! And of course, there are more types.

A lovely woman named Rose recently posed that question to me. There are a lot of detailed reasons, but I’ll try and make it brief. First, you have to differentiate between insurance companies and insurance agencies. Insurance companies are the entity with the really big buildings in most downtown areas and they write the checks. Insurance agencies can have big buildings too, but agencies represent insurance companies and sell to the public. Insurance companies usually choose to focus on a few areas rather than all areas. Life and health carriers also may offer Medicare related coverage, disability, long term care insurance, more ‘people’ oriented coverage. Other carriers focus on the property and casualty types of coverage; auto, homeowners, boat, umbrella policies, business liability, basically more along the lines of ‘stuff.’

Even if a company offers things from both sides of the table, there may be subsidiaries that handle it so you still aren’t going to get ‘one bill.’ From there, you have agents and agencies. There are two main licenses insurance agents hold in California, a Life Agent license or a Property and Casualty license. As a Life Agent, I can’t sell homeowners, and a P&C agent can sell homeowners but not usually health insurance. Interestingly, they can sell life insurance, but that doesn’t mean they will. Some P&C agents focus on the personal lines, but don’t do business liability and workers compensation.

If you want to narrow down who you are dealing with, it helps to find agents that handle more than one line of insurance. There are agents that carry both licenses, but that is a LOT to learn and keep up with.

Personally, I feel there is often an advantage of going to an independent agent or agency over going directly to a specific company. You select one insurance company, they generally will only be able to show you their product line. With an independent you can get a variety of options with just one person to deal with. You can still do multiple policies with one agent, and if they can bundle most or all of what you want with one carrier, you can often get multiple policy discounts.

So find a good multiple line agent, or one good Life Agent coupled with a good P&C Agent, that that should help narrow down some of your hassles. Hopefully! You could go to one doctor for all your needs, but do you really want your gynecologist performing your brain surgery? They won’t be thrilled with doing it.

Last weekend I was at a seminar and met a lovely woman named Lisa, who owns a PR firm and is getting married soon. We were talking about our businesses, I told her about my blog and that I was looking for questions. She had a question about Life Insurance.

She wanted to know what changes she might need to make on her existing life insurance policy. Here are some things you need to consider:

Changing the beneficiary. Depending on what you had the policy for before, you will probably want to change the beneficiary to your new spouse. If you had kids from a prior marriage/relationship, and the policy was intended to take care of them, you need to either keep them as beneficiary (depending on their age) or whomever would be the guardian if something happened to you.

Do you need more coverage? If your policy was intended to take care of you and your assets, reassess where you stand now financially. If you are buying a bigger house, or moving into theirs and the expenses are going up, you might need more coverage. Depending on cost and your health situation, you might do a whole new policy or just add a second to what you already have.

If your needs have decreased, lots of people forget to re-evaluate their life insurance coverage. You might be able to lower your costs with a new policy for a lower face value.

If your policy was covering business needs, and those have changed, you might be able to make the business and your spouse co-beneficiaries and eliminate the need for buying new coverage.

So in short, add up the annual cost of keeping your honey’s life style at the same level it is now, figure out what your financial contribution to that is, and look into the cost of a new policy. Life insurance in general is for income replacement, so see what is affordable without making you “insurance poor.” For help, call your friendly local insurance agent.

For example, nearly seven in 10 people say they favor the concept of requiring employers to provide their workers with health insurance or contribute into a fund that pays to cover the uninsured. President-elect Barack Obama has called for such an employer mandate for medium and large businesses.

But what if they heard the mandate would cause some employers to lay off workers? Support falls dramatically to about three in 10 people, according to a new national survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health.

Similarly, about two out of three people favor requiring all Americans to have health insurance. But when told some people may be required to buy insurance that’s too expensive or it’s something they don’t want, support for the individual mandate falls to 19 percent.

“As we have learned from past debates, public support looms for health reform largest at the beginning of the debate, but it’s relatively easy to chip away at that support with arguments about trade-offs,” said Mollyann Brodie, a Kaiser vice president.

Researchers said the economy is the overwhelming top concern in the United States, cited by nearly three quarters of the public. Health care is a top domestic concern too. But the survey suggests the public is split when it comes to a willingness to sacrifice financially to get more people insured.

About 47 percent were willing to pay higher insurance premiums or taxes, while 49 percent were not. The study is based on a telephone survey of 1,628 adults conducted in early and mid-December. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.”

Me again–So as you might suspect, once there is a suggestion that people break out a check book, interest generally wanes. You don’t want the government paying for it necessarily, because that means us in taxes. Remember the $600 toilet seats? They aren’t big on cutting costs. But maybe this time will be different, I’ve got my fingers crossed!

In California when the cry for decreasing the number of uninsured was big early last year, and about 6 million people were uninsured, there was an estimate of nearly 2 million people that could afford coverage but they didn’t want to pay for it. So we’re potentially going to raise taxes for everyone so those who don’t want to buy coverage are covered? Talk about expensive!

So we’ve got to find a way, we just have to be watchful of upcoming proposals. Be well, and Happy 2009!

First of all, Happy New Year! Here’s hoping 2009 treats people better than 2008.

In the individual health and group health insurance arenas, medical insurance covers medical problems only. The thing we used to debate when I worked for a carrier years ago, is what’s the difference between what is and is not covered under the medical plan when it comes to eye related problems.

Basically, vision care refers to glasses, contact lenses and the exams to figure out how well you do or do not see. Your health plan would cover illness or injury to the eye, like conjunctivitis, a corneal abrasion or cataract removal. If you can’t see because the lenses in your eyes are opaque, the surgery would be covered under medical and usually the eyeglasses associated with it would be as well. If you can’t see because you’re near sighted or far sighted, that fall under vision care.

When looking for a vision plan on an individual basis, there’s not a lot available. VSP offers a plan that you have to buy directly from them, they won’t let agents sell it and it’s about $200/year. Think about it; how much are your glasses or contacts and exam going to cost? It’s hard to market a vision plan that’s affordable because, who is going to buy it? People that WILL use it. Whereas with medical insurance, you may or may not use it but most people acknowledge they should have it, just in case.

Group health insurance parameters are similar as to what is covered how. But, group vision plans may be something to consider as there are so many more of them available and fairly reasonably priced. But for individuals, I usually ask if the have the Auto Club, AAA. Many retail places like Lenscrafters, Pennys or Sears optical offer discount. And you’ve already bought that card!

Health Insurance, life insurance, annuities, long term care insurance–okay, my usual topics are in. But today’s article is not to talk about insurance, I just want to wish everyone a Happy New Year.

2008 was a lousy year for many people, so kick it to the curb and get ready for 2009. As far as insurance, we’ll see what actually changes in the health care arena. It won’t be fast or ‘all curing’ but I hope there will be some positive action.

Especially if it doesn’t mean me losing my source of income!

So, I wish you all a Happy NYE, and we’ll be ringing it in from the Caribbean. Hope that bodes well for smoother sailing in 2009! I look forward to answering your questions again…..